My photographs are self-portrayals, and I use that term deliberately. Self-portraiture implies a fixed self, observed from outside. What I make is something active: a becoming, an essaying, a beholding of my visual self-experience.
Photography and digital collage are the main methods, though the work draws in family snapshots, paintings, silhouettes, appropriated images of all kinds. Sometimes I add my face onto another person’s; sometimes I lift myself out of a picture entirely. I place lenses in front of the image surface, so they read as peering eyes. I put photographs on boxes, opening the space behind the image plane. My likeness often disappears; I am present in these images, but rarely in the way a mirror would show me.
The approach is feminist and research-led, rooted in ideas around entanglement: the collapsing of mind with body, self with image, subject with object. It is a framework for work that is less interested in what a self is than in how it feels to see oneself.
I am inspired by Helen Chadwick for her incisive playfulness and by Claude Cahun for her fearlessness. Both are inventive and rebellious. Both understood that looking at yourself without flinching and laughing while doing it is a feminist act.
